Book Review: Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren Harris, by James King

Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren HarrisBy James King
Thomas Allen Publishers
357 pp; $44.95

Some of our most recognizably “Canadian” imagery draws from the works of the Group of Seven, whose stylized depictions of the Canadian landscape (coast to coast) seem to be well-suited for posters, stamps, book covers and the like. However, in this mass reproduction, something of the urgency in the original works is lost. In Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren Harris, biographer James King draws a compelling portrait of one of the leaders of this national artistic movement as he and his fellow artists worked to break from European influence and forge a different kind of Canadian art.

King’s approach is meticulously chronological. He starts with the artist as a young boy, growing up in a wealthy, religious family in Brantford, Ont. Lawren’s grandfather, Alanson Harris, was a devout Baptist and founder of the farm implement company that eventually comprised half of Massey-Harris; Lawren’s father, Tom, was a secretary for the family business. Lawren’s mother, Annie Stewart, was the daughter of a Baptist minister turned social reformer. His religious upbringing would have deep impact on his art. King describes Lawren’s early life as marked by frail health and tragedy — when Lawren was only nine years old, his father died suddenly, and the family moved to Toronto to be closer to his Annie’s family.

Though bright, Lawren was not particularly studious. After he finished high school, he enrolled at the University of Toronto, where it quickly became clear that his mind was elsewhere — his notebooks were full of sketches. On the advice of his professors, his mother decided he should study in Europe. Though Paris was the traditional training ground for artists in the early 20th century, Harris ended up in Berlin where his uncle and aunt were living.

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Berlin at the turn of the last century was an overcrowded, poverty-ridden city, a change from provincial, uptight Toronto. Harris devoted himself to his studies, learning the mechanics of his art and gaining technical skills in drawing and painting. With the German Secessionists coming to the fore, Harris was certainly influenced by the social messages imbued in their works, but was also exposed to a variety of other artists ­­— Caspar David Friedrich, Munch, Van Gogh and Gauguin are just a few that King cites as influential. At the same time, Harris was experiencing a spiritual shift, drifting away from his religious roots. When in Berlin, he discovered the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was to become a lifelong influence. While abroad, Harris also became acquainted with theosophy, and officially joined the Toronto Theosophical Society in 1923; theosophical ideas had deep impact on his artistic practice as he sought to infuse his landscapes with spiritual resonance.

Perhaps more importantly in the context of Canadian iconography, it was in Germany that Harris came to view the creation of national art as a vital project; Harris returned to Canada full of self-confidence and his decision to focus on landscape stemmed from this interest in a national art. Canada was his “native land,” sure, but as King points out: “[L]andscape was the genre in which to make one’s mark. As a calling, this was a demonstration of oneness with the spirit of the entire land. There was a crucial patriotic dimension: to be a proper country, a nation needed to have its own distinct landscape, and it required painters to enshrine it.”

He settled in Toronto, rented a studio and got married. His wife, Beatrice (Trixie) Phillips, was the daughter of a self-made millionaire. King describes her as a conventional woman, and then speculates that “at the time of his marriage, Harris felt he could somehow blend the life of the socialist with the life of the artist.” (On a side note, this type of speculation, while often a necessity in a biography, is presented here in italicized recreations of Harris’s inner life; instead of allowing access into the inner workings of the subject, these asides pull the reader out of what is a subtle and comprehensive biographical account.) Harris began working in earnest in Toronto, showing his paintings at Ontario Artists Society exhibitions, and soon became part of a group of similarly minded painters. When the Group of Seven formed in 1920, Harris assumed the role of spokesman.

Throughout his biography, King parallels Harris’s artistic growth — from moody urban streetscapes to stylized landscapes to colourful abstraction — to changes in his personal life. Throughout his life, the struggle to balance the visible and invisible elements of life, be it in the relationship between visual representation and spiritualism in his landscapes, or his ongoing social struggles, especially in his marriage. In 1934, Lawren and Trixie divorced — a radical step for someone in Harris’s social class. He subsequently took up with (and then married) Bess Housser, a fellow painter, theosophist and a close friend. This change marks a freeing of Harris’s artistic vision. The newlyweds moved south of the border, first to New Hampshire, and then to Santa Fe, N.M., where they lived and painted, and it was during this period that Harris began to experiment with abstraction.

The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to their time in the United States. In 1940, they moved to Vancouver to be close to Lawren’s beloved mother. The couple easily settled into life on the West Coast, and Harris resumed his cultural advocacy, becoming the British Columbia representative for the Federation of Canadian Artists (founded 1941) and, in 1944, president. Highly active in the Vancouver arts scene, his home was decorated with works by local artists, and he often acted as a dealer, selling the pieces off his walls to budding collectors. Harris lived out his days in Vancouver and died in 1970.

Whenever I set foot in the Art Gallery of Ontario, in the spirit of secular pilgrimage, I find a moment for the delicate colouring and bold symmetry of Lawren Harris’s Figure With Rays of Light (1928). Though it rates only a brief mention in Inward Journey, the work is considered one of Harris’s most important, revealing the bridge between the representational paintings of the first half of his career, and the abstract, metaphysical works to come. The work had disappeared for more than 60 years, evidently in storage in a basement in Scarborough, before it was purchased by Kenneth Thomson at auction in 2006 for just over $1-million. The subsequent donation to the AGO revealed a previously unknown part of Harris’s artistic vision and it is in the same spirit that King’s biography sheds a ray of light on the life of one of Canada’s most well known, but unknown, artists.

Medeine Tribinevicius is a freelance writer, translator, and curator in Toronto.

Correction: An earlier version of this review stated Harris was born in Brampton, Ontario. The Post regrets the error.